True Love Way Read online

  “What’s up with those stupid glasses anyway?” Pepper whispers not so quietly to her friend who’s sitting beside her.

  With her head held high and her shoulders back, the new girl takes a seat next to mine. She pulls a pen and yellow-covered notebook out of her book bag and doodles on the front of it. As class moves along, she starts drawing stars and smiley faces on her hands. Neither one of us pays attention as Mrs. Alabaster goes over this semester’s syllabus.

  “I’m going to be an artist when I grow up,” Penelope whispers.

  She doesn’t look directly at me as she colors in a pink heart on the tip of her finger, but I can see her eyes briefly move in my direction from behind the sunglasses she still hasn’t taken off.

  I don’t know her well enough to tell her that her art sucks, so I just smile and say, “That’s cool.”

  Picasso turns in her seat. Dark lenses don’t completely black out her eyes, and I can see her long lashes flapping behind them.

  “If we’re going to be friends, neighbor, there has to be trust. I’m no artist, boy, and you’re no liar,” she says quietly, not to disrupt the class. “That was a test, and you failed.”

  My heartbeat picks up, and my palms start to sweat. The right side of my mouth lifts into a smirk, and I can’t even help it. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  Penelope shrugs and picks up her pen. She scribbles on the empty spaces between her knuckles and says, “That’s not possible.”

  “You don’t have feelings?”

  The new girl shakes her head. “Not when I’m invisible.”

  She acts as if I’m the invisible one after that, turning away from me and leaning her head on her palm so that her brown hair serves as a wall between us. Paying attention to anything while Pen ignores me isn’t happening. Even when Herb starts to whisper, “Penelope and Dillon sitting in a tree… ” I pretend he doesn’t exist until he pokes me in the back of the neck with his pencil.

  I spin in my blue plastic seat and swat it out of his hand. The orange-yellow number two pencil flies across the room, tip-tapping back and forth from its lead tip to its pink eraser before it finally lands and rolls against some kid’s new shoes.

  “Dude, that was my only one.” Herbert, big for twelve, with dark curls on his head, drops his shoulders and sinks into his seat. “I was just playing with you.”

  “Wait until I see Mathilda, Herb. You’re going to regret it,” I say, passing him a pencil. My mom loaded my backpack with more than I’ll use this year and next.

  My best friend scoffs, shrugging me off like he isn’t nervous about the redheaded girl who makes his cheeks blush as bright as her hair. We ran into his crush a few times this summer because we all live on the same street, and he acted as if he didn’t hold her hand on the last day of seventh grade before her mom picked her up in a beat-up station wagon.

  “I don’t even know who you’re talking about,” the liar says, flipping his new pencil between his large fingers.

  “Mathilda Tipp,” Kyle pipes up loud enough for everyone to hear, like he might actually believe that Herbert forgot about the girl whom he’s liked since he was eleven. “You held her hand last year.”

  Again, the entire class explodes in laughter. This time it’s not at Penelope’s expense, and Herbert likes the attention. He soaks it up, throwing crumpled paper balls at Kyle and making up lies about how many girlfriends he had this summer.

  “Mathilda who?” he jokes, chuckling with everyone else until Mrs. Alabaster smacks a yardstick against her desk.

  As the energy level calms and we’re assigned some work to keep us busy, I look over at the one who makes my heart rickety. To my surprise, she’s pulled her hair back into a low ponytail and her dark lensed-covered eyes stare right back at me.

  “When’s your birthday, and why is this town called Castle Rain?” she asks. Pen’s hands are entirely covered in scribbled and crappy drawn shapes.

  “September twentieth, and because the cliffs by the beach look like castles, and it rains a lot,” I say with a nervous itch in my throat.

  Pink lips spread into a wide smile, and Penelope says, “That’s my birthday, too.”

  “Seriously?” I ask.

  She reaches over and grabs my hand, pulling it across the small aisle between us. Using the marker she drew green leaves on her fingers with, Penelope Finnel paints my thumbnail the color of the trees outside. I don’t stop her.

  “Yep, my birthday is in six weeks. I’ll be thirteen.” She colors my next fingernail, and with a sigh, she says, “My mom thinks I should make friends so I can have a party to celebrate becoming an official teenager. Like it’s some big deal.”

  “Being a teenager is going to be awesome,” I say.

  Pen drops my hand and pulls the hair tie free.

  “I meant making friends.”

  The girl I share a birthday with is alone at lunch, against a tree’s trunk in the school’s courtyard. I watch her through the dirty cafeteria window where I sit with my pals, who fill every chair around the circular table. In brand new clothes, with wishing-we-could-still-sleep-in eyes, my friends talk about what they all did during summer break loudly. Their laughter is louder.

  Turning from Pen, I try to act normal, as if my new neighbor hasn’t overtaken my mind. I unpack the all-organic lunch my mom forces me to eat and nod like I know what anyone is talking about.

  “You know about Nipples After Dark, and you didn’t tell us?” Kyle asks, blowing his long blonde bangs out of his blue eyes. “Some friend you are.”

  Scrunching my eyebrows, I drop my peanut butter and honey sandwich and ask, “What?”

  “You nodded when Kyle asked if anyone knows what Skin-a-max is,” Mathilda Tipp answers. She eats a small spoonful from her chocolate pudding cup.

  My face burns bright, and all my friends look at me with funny smiles as I try to think of some reason—other than the truth—as to why I know about cable’s late-night dirty movies. Bad art and bubblegum bubbles cloud my generally good judgment.

  Before I admit that I might be obsessed with Penelope, I give them a half-truth.

  “I’ve walked in on Risa watching it.”

  Kyle pops a fruit snack into his mouth and smiles. “I dig your sister.”

  Darting the straw into my all-natural juice box, I turn the spotlight away from me by asking my buddy, “How do you know about it?”

  He goes on and on for the rest of the lunch hour about being unable to sleep the night before and sneaking into the living room to watch television with the volume all the way down.

  “Some nipples are huge and kind of dark-looking,” he admits with a proud smirk on his face. “And vaginas are hairy.”

  Trying to find my way around school after lunch, the hallway is crowded, and I don’t pay attention to what’s in front of me as I search for my new class. For one hour a day, all eighth graders switch out of homeroom to an elective course to prepare us for high school. I want to be a doctor when I grow up, and knowing a second language will be helpful, so I chose Spanish. When I got my schedule this morning, I was pissed to see I got cooking instead.

  My mom taught me how to use the microwave, so this should be an easy A.

  Slowly strolling with my eyes on the numbers above the doors, I literally walk right into Penelope. We bump heads, and the sunglasses that hide her eyes fly from her face to the floor. Some kid kicks them, and they skid to the corner, landing upside down. Grabbing Pen by her arm before she falls to her bottom, I feel her black sweater is still warm from the sun.

  “Dang it, Dillon,” she says, palming the red mark on her head where our foreheads crashed together.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, rubbing my own head.

  Letting out a heavy sign, Penelope pushes her hair behind her ear and looks at me with unhidden eyes. Brown has never been so dark, eyes have never been so round, and eyelashes have never been so long. Light freckles clutter the bridge of her nose and fade across the roundness of her cheeks. E
yebrows a shade darker than her irises are thicker unconcealed behind sunglasses.

  Pretty, I think to myself.

  It isn’t until Pepper Hill walks between us, knocking Penelope back a step, that the new girl realizes her sunglasses aren’t on. She automatically lets her hair fall back into her face, and the smile melts from her lips. Looking back and forth, Pen’s breathing noticeably quickens, and the little bit of color in her face turns white. She turns in a circle, but doesn’t spot what I’ve figured out she thinks makes her invisible.

  “They’re right here,” I say, quickly walking to the corner where her glasses are.

  She snatches them from my hands, slips them back onto her face, and walks into the cooking class without another word. Following her is automatic, and sitting in the chair beside her in class is thoughtless.

  “Go away,” she groans, safe behind blacked-out lenses. “You’re freaking me out.”

  Scooting my seat closer to hers, I lean in, picking up the faint scent of grass and wind on her clothes. I like the way she talks out of the side of her mouth.

  “Do you have a bike?” I ask.

  “No,” she responds right away, crushing my ego. Pen starts to fill out the questionnaire that has been left on the tables for us to answer. As she’s curving the E in Penelope, she looks at me and says, “But I have rollerblades.”

  With nothing between our houses but yards, Penelope’s bedroom is directly across from mine. Her window is covered by plum-colored curtains, and mine by dusty blinds—both of which remain open since we discovered the other looking.

  The doorbell rings, and my mom calls me downstairs as I slip on my shoes for school and quickly scrawl on a sheet of paper with a thick black marker. After pressing the message against the cool glass so that Pen can see what I’ve written, my heartbeat jumps when she appears. Like every morning for the last two weeks, a pair of sunglasses covers her eyes. Today’s frames are blue in the shape of stars.

  She reads what’s on my paper.

  Ready?

  With a fast nod, the new girl turns and disappears out of her room.

  “Dillon, your friends are here, honey,” Mom says loudly from the bottom of the stairs. Her voice bounces off the walls.

  I grab my backpack from the end of my bed and rush out into the hallway, right behind Risa. Scented like skunk-smelling smoke, which she swears isn’t anything illegal, my sister moves out of my way so I can run past her and take the steps down two at a time.

  “Give Pen my love,” she calls after me with a giggle and a sigh.

  Herb’s raiding the fridge, and my mom’s cleaning something from Kyle’s face with a little spit when I rush into the kitchen. It’s cool with me that Herbert helps himself to the sugar-free cucumber-lime gelatin I refused to eat for dessert last night, and I dig Kyle’s straight spine and lock-kneed posture as my mom licks the back of her thumb to scrub what are obviously freckles from my best friend’s chin. But Penelope’s waiting for us, so I take my bike’s chain and lock from the counter and leave my pals behind.

  They’re quick to follow.

  “Let’s ditch the girl,” Kyle complains, dropping his skateboard onto the driveway. “She’s too slow.”

  I roll my bike off the front porch and tighten the straps on my backpack before taking a seat on my ride. Herb’s already doing a bunny hop off the curb when my neighbor and her parents come out of their house.

  “I heard that,” Pen jokes. She touches six plastic wheels to concrete and then roller blades in my direction. The dirty red shoes she’ll change into when we get to school are tied to her book bag.

  “You think my daughter is slow, boy?” Wayne Finnel aka the Dillon Nazi asks. He crosses his hairy arms over his chest and taunts me with creepy eyebrows and bulging shoulder muscles.

  I’m the one with a stiff spine and locked knees now.

  “It wasn’t me,” I blurt out.

  “Better not have been,” he says, flinching when his wife elbows him.

  “Leave the Decker kid alone, Wayne,” she says with a smile.

  Penelope pirouettes from her driveway to mine, twirling so smoothly on blades that her hair sails around her head in a perfect circle. Coming to a full stop in front of my bicycle, her early-morning face lights up behind glasses I wish she would take off.

  “Ready?” she asks softly, mimicking the note I wrote.

  Beginning in the days when we rode bikes with training wheels, Herb, Kyle, and I have always raced to school. Only a couple of blocks away, it’s never taken more than ten minutes to get there. Now that Pen’s rolling with us, we’ve chased the tardy bell almost everyday. She likes to take her time, pausing to chase squirrels and smell blossomed roses.

  Mom comes out of the house to see us off. She waves toward the house to our left and says, “Good morning, Sonya.”

  Mrs. Finnel, oversized and over-happy, wags her hand back and forth. Her arm fat swings.

  Mr. Finnel flares his nostrils.

  “Look, no hands!” Herbert zooms past the house with Mathilda Tipp on his handlebars. Her legs are extended in front of her, and her hands are clutching the rubber grips. Rosy hair swats my friend in the face.

  With one last good-bye to the parentals, the rest of us take off behind the daredevil and the redhead. We don’t get to the end of the street before Penelope and I are left in the dust. She moves so slowly, I don’t bother using my pedals and walk my bike forward while she twirls and dips like a ballerina.

  “You can go ahead without me,” Pen says.

  Instead of trying to convince her for the hundredth time that I don’t want to go without her, I change the subject, pushing my bike over the cracks in the pavement.

  “Don’t tell him I told you this, but Herbert has it bad for Mathilda.”

  Blue stars slip down Pen’s nose, and she pushes them up over eyes I haven’t seen again since the first day of school. It’s a different style and color of sunglasses every day, never once wearing the same pair twice.

  “I can tell,” she says.

  We stop at the end of the road and look both ways before crossing. The unforgiving late-August sun starts to burn through the gray cloud cover above, shining through full tree branches that line the street, which will be leafless in a couple of months. A yellow-orange school bus full of our classmates drives by, puffing black smoke into the air. As it passes, a cat runs in front of its path, barely clearing the large tires before becoming roadkill.

  Penelope screams, grasping onto the front of her sweater where her heart beats beneath. As the school bus continues forward, unaware of its near feline-murdering status, Pen stops, and I stop. The cat is long gone, but judging by the screamer’s pale face and heaving shoulders, this isn’t about the stray.

  I get off my bike and let it crash to its side. Steady on her blades, but breathing like a madwoman, Penelope stares toward the road where the cat almost met its maker. The piercing scream this girl let out still rings in my ears.

  “Hey,” I say, reaching for her shoulder.

  When I touch it, Pen snaps out of the daze and shifts her head my way. The color drains from her face, and her brown eyes are wide under her bluish lenses.

  “Are you all right?” I drop my hand.

  She takes a deep breath and kind of laughs, shrugging her shoulder. “I was scared.”

  I stick my hands into my pockets, now noticing how fast my own heart beats. As Penelope chews her fingernails, I curl ten fingers into my palms and keep them tucked in my denim so I don’t do the same.

  “Where did the cat go?” she asks, mumbling over sore nail beds. “It did make it across, right? Did you see it, Dillon? Do you think it got hit?”

  Without thinking, I pull Pen’s hand from her mouth and hold it down at her side so she can’t make herself bleed anymore. A smear of red coats her bottom lip.

  “It ran away,” I say. My grip is tight around her trembling wrist. “The cat’s alive.”

  The skating ballerina who quickens my pulse nod
s her head and swipes the blood from her lip with her tongue. “Okay. Okay.”

  Since the day she and her family moved into the house beside mine, I’ve become obsessed with Penelope Finnel. Purple-orange is her favorite color, even after I told her purple-orange isn’t a thing. She ties her left shoe the loop, swoop, and pull way, and the right with bunny ears. Pen opens her bananas from the end, and she eats her eggs with boysenberry syrup.

  The girl who wakes up and appears in her window every morning at six-thirty sharp, with insane bedhead, only uses cola-scented lip balm and loves grunge music. She has her mom cut the crusts off her sandwiches, sides first and then the top and bottom. Pen uses the same pink plastic thermos every day at school, even though the cup is cracked. She doesn’t blink an eye as fruit punch drips from the bottom, always staining her shirt.

  Despite knowing all of that, her bitten raw fingernails are brand new to me. I lift her hand to get a better look at what she’s done to herself, rubbing my thumb over her red-hot raw skin and peeling cuticles.

  “You’re my best friend.” Penelope’s soft voice forces my eyes from her hands to her blue star-shaped rims. “I’m lucky to have you.”

  Ditto.

  We sprint after the tardy bell, skidding to our seats as it rings, and music crackles and buzzes from the speaker box on the wall at the front of the classroom. With smiles on our faces, Pen and I place our hands over our hearts and pledge allegiance to the flag. After morning announcements, we’re finally able to sit and catch our breath, and Penelope changes out of her rollerblades.

  “You two are pushing it,” Mrs. Alabaster says before beginning roll call.

  Penelope drives her smile wider at our fed-up instructor and turns her dingy shoelaces into bunny ears. The curve of her lips disappears as she loops, swoops, and pulls the other side, though. An hour into class, when we’re supposed to be figuring out what the ratio of something, something, and something is, my best girl hasn’t bothered to open her math book. Her head is down on her folded arms, and her hair blankets both.